People are used to Facebook and go for the quick default: Posting onto the group’s wall. They do that even if I’ve asked them a question in the forum. -_-

QUICK AND DIRTY: The easy quick solution is: Disable the forum. (though I’ve heard in other posts that some have had trouble uninstalling a group’s forum recently…)

But that doesn’t always work. Sometimes a group just needs a forum. (although the straight-up stream is pretty nice)

At that point, what do I do?

LESS QUICK, STILL DIRTY: A somewhat lame solution is to use BP group extras to make FORUMS the landing page for the group on a group-by group basis.

Ideally, I’d like people to see the activity stream, but not be able to post directly onto it, but rather to be simply directed (like on BuddyPress.org) to the various forum topics.

HALF THE ANNOUNCE-GROUP PLUGIN: Any thoughts on how to do this? Someone suggested commenting out parts of the “announcements-only” plugin to block posting to the stream but allow forum participation. Would that work? @dwenaus

HALF THE BP-GROUP EXTRAS PLUGIN: If I was going to go the BP-group-extras route and just diminish the activity stream via navigation rather than privilege, I’d want to comment out the “custom fields” part of the group, since my groups don’t need that and it would just confuse users. Thoughts on how I would do that? @slaFFik Or is there some more simple way of reordering the group’s tabs / landing page?

FINALLY, is there some simple and/or creative way I’m failing to think about this?

All I know is that this is a SIGNIFICANT issue for me. In my experience so far, forum discussions and activity stream discussions DO NOT play nice with each other from a user experience standpoint, and sites like buddypress.org and facebook.com understand that and don’t allow it. I’m just wondering what “the common person” can do to avoid that same conflict.

I’ve already got that disabled. But that doesn’t stop somebody from posting in “What’s New In This Group?” when they see in the stream a question that I asked within a forum . All it does is remove the “reply” button from the stream notice.

The overall issue here (of which the above is just an example) is of the confusion created where there’s two places in a group (forum, stream) to create conversations.

So in simplest terms, I need a way to prevent or discourage stream-posting in groups where I want a forum enabled.

And I agree with the issue as encountered it myself, but not sure there’s a whole lot one can do about it given both forum and group updates are running in a group.

Of course one rather crude and hackish approach might be to simply wrap the textarea update in a conditional to only show for certain groups or non at all, remove it from view so it’s not an option to post into the activity stream.

Namely, if you created a required extra field that groups had to fill out, and then made it the update box conditional based upon that.

Of course, that wouldn’t block people posting there from their own “What’s New” box on root.com/activity… but I doubt most people would do that anyway.

@Hugo, you seem like a pretty active and experienced voice in this community, whereas I’m fairly noobish (I don’t speak PHP)… any chance we could work together on moving this forward, either with something as simple as a trac improvement request or even maybe putting a patch together? I’m decent at design but not code.

@ Everyone else… are others experiencing this / agreeing? This is the biggest issue that has hit me in the face on my first serious BP project…

Yes, it hits me in the face too. My users post to the activity stream all the time. I have my groups page as the default static page for my site. When users click on the groups they are presented with the default home page and the what’s new box, so post in that. Don’t get me wrong, replies can be added. But I think it would be much nicer if users were directed to the forum page instead. There are instructions within the support forum for making the forum page the default landing page for groups, but none of them work for me.

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